“He was a spy; he got what he deserved!” said the faces of the silent Palermitans,--grave, sinewy, fierce-eyed men, dark as Arabs. * * * * * “Petrosino must have been a very uncommon man, from all you tell me,” I said; “what did he look like?” “He was a fine man,” one of the company answered, “so handsome, so remarkable looking. He had a Napoleonic head.” “Yes,” said the doctor, “he had indeed.” “But you never saw him!” A queer look came into the doctor’s eyes; he did not answer. “Where could you have seen him?” “I never saw him alive,” said the doctor, “you forget, I embalmed Petrosino.” One of the newspapers had a caricature by Piff Paff of the Prefect of Palermo with his arm about Mr. Bishop, pointing to a long line of criminals. “Here they are, _caro mio_, take your choice of them;” says the Prefect. The paper was quickly suppressed. I tried in vain to buy a copy. None of my friends in Palermo by the way had seen or heard of the profane poem supposed to have been printed in a Messina newspaper, calling upon the Saviour to prove He could work miracles by sending a good earthquake. Mr. Bishop never heard the story till he went to Rome. I asked many people about this; no one had seen it, no one could give the name of the newspaper in which it was printed. Agnese and Napoleone both had assured me that the earthquake was sent as a punishment for the poem. According to Agnese it was written by an anarchist; Napoleone held that it was by a free mason. I have come to the conclusion that the whole matter is an entire invention. At our hotel I made the acquaintance of a lady whose name I never learned. When I spoke of our Consul she told me what admirable service he had rendered. “It was Mr. Bishop’s idea to set the _profughi_ in the different _ricoveri_ to work,” she said. “At first all the rest of the Committee were opposed to it. He tried first one, then another; at last he found a priest, an admirable man, who backed him. I don’t know what they would have done without him.” How Griscom’s slogan “We help these people to help themselves!” rings out. I heard its echo in Palermo, Syracuse, Messina, wherever one of his staff has been. Mr. Bishop spoke with the greatest cordiality of the Palermitan Committee. “They have done fine work,” he said. He mentioned the wife of General Mazza as one of the most earnest of the leaders. There were still 7,000 _profughi_ in Palermo at this time. I went with Canon Skeggs and Dr. Parlato to visit one of the largest _ricoveri_. It was admirably arranged in a big garden surrounded on three sides by an arcade like a wide cloister. This had been boarded in, and divided off into neat little dwellings where the refugees lived in families. They all had good beds and were fairly well clothed. The Canon had a word for every one.